Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess knowledge, attitudes and practice of medical doctors in some selected public hospitals towards Clinical Pharmacy Services in Ethiopia.

Methodology: Cross sectional study design was employed to assess knowledge, attitude and practices of medical doctors towards clinical pharmacy services. The study population was selected using simple random sampling technique. Self-administered questionnaires were used to extract relevant information from the study subjects. The data was entered, cleaned and analyzed by using SPSS version-20.

Results: The mean age of the study participants was 28.2 ± 5.2 years with a range between 20-53 years and 87.1% were males. 89.6% of the respondents are general practitioner and 8(8.6%) with different specialization with year of experience 2.94 + 3(0.5-22 year). Majority of respondents are knowledgeable regarding to clinical pharmacists as a member of medical teams and their services in reducing medication related errors and health related costs. More than 74% of the respondents were highly satisfied by the role of clinical pharmacists in counseling of patients regarding to safe and appropriate use of medications, prevention, detection and management adverse drug reactions. The present study depicted that lack of support from administration (70%); shortage of staff (63.4%) and lack of adequate support by the health care team (62.4%) were the major limitations to practice clinical pharmacy service in the hospitals.

Conclusions: Physicians undoubtedly considered that pharmacists are drug information experts. Nevertheless, their anticipation of pharmacists as providers of quality clinically-focused pharmacy services was little. Physicians were willing to collaborate with clinical pharmacists in monitoring drug therapy and improving patient care by identifying medication errors.

Keywords: Clinical pharmacy service; Patient oriented; Drug product information; Pharmaceutical care